


these, our bodies, possessed by light

by icarxs



Category: The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), The Mummy Series
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, colleagues to lovers?, gratuitous 20s smoking, i guess, the effects of wwi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 12:39:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8372584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarxs/pseuds/icarxs
Summary: “I can’t get the measure of you,” he says.It’s such an English idiom. John’s breathing stutters briefly to a halt. “What do you mean?” he asks, his tone unserious, except he knows what he means; he’s heard it so often. Who are you, Jonathan? Who have you been? Mischief maker, soldier, medic, brother, lover, treasure hunter. Thief, school boy, almost-priest. John doesn’t have the measure of himself.[snapshots of a relationship you wouldn't tell your children about]





	1. 1925

**Author's Note:**

> I love the Carnahan siblings with all my heart, please protect them. (title is siken)

**1925**

Evy becomes Evelyn O’Connell so fast that for John it’s like one moment they’re in the tunnels in Hamunaptra and the next he’s slumped outside his room next to Ardeth Bay, whiskey in hand, unwilling to go to bed just yet but too anti-social for the party below. Maybe Bay feels the same way – he’s never been much for crowds. He doesn’t smoke, and though Jonathan had discovered to his detriment the strength of the arak that the medjai commonly drink he hasn’t seen Bay touch a drop of wine all evening.

He feels young like this. Well, he is young – in years _and_ in maturity, if you listen to Evy, which he doesn’t, ever, because when he does he ends up fighting the undead underground – but sitting like this, back against the wall, legs outstretched, alcohol in hand, reminds him of when he used to come home from Eton over the holidays, those rare moments when his parents were here rather than Egypt. There’s something illicit about the press of his bedroom door behind him. Bay doesn’t seem to feel that at all, probably because English houses are all the same to him. He has his dark eyes closed. John squints at him through the thin whiskey haze. “You alright?”

“What?”

“You.” John points at him. “Are you alright?”

“Fine.” Bay tilts his head to one side as if to test his balance, revises: “Good.”

Downstairs the party is still going on; Evy’s laugh rises above it all like the tinkling of glass, so delighted John could cry for her; she has been shining these past few months, shining and shining with all this love she has inside her. It coats her in a film from head to toe, impenetrable. O’Connell looks at her as though she’s some precious object that has ended up in his possession by uncertain means and he isn’t sure whether he should return her or keep her. John had made some speech earlier in the afternoon that had managed not to mention mummies for the sake of the cream of the British nobility that fill the halls; Evy had enough to deal with, bringing an American into their midst, without admitting he was an orphaned treasure hunter. Bay yawns, a great stretch like a cougar down to his toes. He’d caused a bit of a stir, the old dowager countesses clutching their pearls.

“Your country,” he says. “It’s so cold.”

“You’re not wrong,” John says, draining his glass. “Cold and wet and miserable, old pal, but at least there aren’t any apocalyptic crises, am I right?” Bay narrows his eyes at him. John grins. “Or at least, not yet.”

“I don’t know why,” Bay says, “but I feel like you could acomplish it.”

“That’s me. I bring the apocalypse. The end of days is Jonathan Carnahan.”

Bay snorts, which is as close as he gets to a laugh, usually. John feels unnecessarily pleased to himself; make a man laugh, he thinks, and you’re halfway to his bed. That’s why he’s been in so many, he supposes: he’s always been good at making people laugh. John sighs just a little bit, for men lost. Bay says, “isn’t it strange,” and he sounds like he’s choosing his words carefully, his accent light, “how funerals and weddings are the same the world over.”

John laughs a bit himself. His parents’ funeral had been a bit like this, he supposes, after him and Evy had been sent to bed. He’d snuck out here, sat in this very position, and listened as the voices grew louder and louder, the wine flowing, the port poured at around midnight. Evy had probably slept through it, because she was the good one; he had slipped down the backstairs and met one of the maids in the scullery. “They’re like mirrors,” he said. “People like to celebrate, whether it’s the beginning of life or the end of it.”

Bay grunts. John wishes he had more whiskey. “Have you seen many?”

“What?”

“Funerals?”

John rolls his eyes. “Why are you asking?”

Bay shrugs. “I can’t get the measure of you,” he says.

It’s such an English idiom. John’s breathing stutters briefly to a halt. “What do you mean?” he asks, his tone unserious, except he knows what he means; he’s heard it so often. Who are you, Jonathan? Who have you been? Mischief maker, soldier, medic, brother, lover, treasure hunter. Thief, school boy, almost-priest. John doesn’t have the measure of himself.

“O’Connell – he makes sense to me. Your sister, she makes sense to me. You?” Bay has leant towards him, holding him in place with his dark eyes. “You mean nothing.”

“Well, that’s a bit harsh. After all we’ve been through.”

Thankfully, the other man breaks eye contact, turning away and scoffing. “That’s not what I meant.”

John runs a finger around the rim of the crystal tumbler and tries to get his heartbeat under control. Bay looks away from him, in the direction of the bookcase. Someone is halfway up the stairs, giggling, telling a long-winded joke. Eventually, John gives in with bad grace. “Not many,” he says, “but only because we didn’t have time for them during the war.”

That’s something Ardeth Bay can understand, and he nods and pulls, from somewhere in his robes, a short dagger, silver handle, unsheathed. He flicks it between his fingers like a pendulum, up and down, up and down; John chuckles. “Don’t let Evy see you with that.”

Bay smiles a half-smile. “She is a little distracted, I feel.” There’s a bit of a spark in his eyes. “I can’t believe O’Connell hasn’t taken her upstairs yet.”

There, an implication of sex: John’s poor heartbeat jumps again. Isn’t that sick – the man’s talking about his _sister_. But he can’t help it. “I doubt tonight is anything except a formality,” he grins. “Evy’s not one for waiting, and they’ve had months.”

“She’s a strong woman, your sister.”

John raises his eyebrows. “Strong is one word for it.”

“She told me you fought at Verdun.”

It’s a change in tack, but John goes with it. “Fought is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to Verdun.”

“Misnomer?” Bay screws his face up when confronted with an English word he doesn’t know, and John likes it. He swirls the remains of his ice around in his glass.

“It wasn’t much of a fight.”

“Your battles here. They were not…” Bay searches for a word, and John doesn’t let him worry for too long.

“They were not,” he shrugs, his mouth twisting. “They were not.”

 

They fall into bed eventually. Bay is sober, and John is on his way to it, when their mouths collide. It’s like an accident. John isn’t really sure how the medjai feel about men having other men, but then again, the English aren’t too keen on it either, so he doesn’t ask; he has made a policy of not asking, through all the fumbles at Eton and the slower romances at Oxford and the occasional panicked kiss in the trenches. There’s nothing like a cock in your hand to remind you of your own mortality when it comes to the law: a verbal warning is unnecessary.

Bay’s robes make a clinking noise when they hit the ground and John laughs. He says, I’d kick them out of the way but I’d probably stub my toe, and Bay says, or cut it. He says, don’t you ever shut up, John? He presses him into the mattress with his hips and talks Arabic in his ear. John comes messily between them, and his mouth tastes clean.

The next morning Ardeth catches a lift with Rick to the station and gets a train, final destination: Catalonia. John has a very long bath, and a drink just after noon.


	2. 1927

**1927**

John’s surprisingly sober when his sister returns – shockingly sober, harshly sober, the kind that hurts his eyes with shards of light like glass, that makes him want to tiptoe – and for a few precious seconds he considers the warmth of his bed, which is calling quite insistently to him, and the girl beneath the sheets, who is not. But then he hears Rick swear, and there’s a loud shattering, crashing sort of noise that means Evy’s clearing the huge dining table in the foyer, and he knows something’s wrong.

He shrugs his shirt on. The girl, whose name is something like Mary but potentially not Mary, stirs on the pillow, yawns, rosebud mouth. He says, “won’t be a second, love,” and she murmurs something and rolls over. Her hair curls appealing at the nape of her neck. John heaves a sigh. “This had better be good,” he mutters.

The O’Connells live in the house he used to think of his – he’d grown up here, sometimes, though he’d done most of his growing in the corridors of Eton, or else on the moors up near Gordonstown, in the mud at Verdun and somewhere in dusty tombs near old Alexandria. The bannisters swoop down to the foyer like wings, like sand-dunes. Rick has blood smeared all over his suit jacket, his nice smart shoes. John swears and takes the stairs down three at a time; Evy looks up and her face is chalk white.

“John, thank God,” she says. Her collarbones seem very frail under the heavy black beading of her dress, and there’s scarlet smudged over one cheekbone like rouge applied wrong. “There was a complication with the Prague case, I don’t know –”

Ardeth Bay is laid out on their fucking dining table. For some reason John glances up the stairs, to the girl, thinks, _but I_ – and then the thought is snatched away by some sort of strange wild panic, because he is _bleeding_. There is blood _all over the table_. Evy grabs his upper arm and gets a bloody handprint smeared all over the thin white of his shirt. Her other hand is pressed to Bay’s stomach. “Jonathan,” she hisses.

“Jesus,” he says, succinctly. “Where did he dig himself up from?”

He hasn’t seen Bay in over a year, not since Alex’s christening. He doesn’t look any different, except for the fact that he appears to be bleeding out all over John’s sister. John goes for his med bag, nestled in its emergency hiding place under the stairs.

Rick grunts, “Prague.”

“Not much sand there,” says John. Evy’s hands, he realises are red to the wrist, like evening gloves. Not a bullet wound, then, something worse.

Bay is clammy to the touch. John holds out a hand. “Knife,” he says.

“Knife?” Evy repeats incredulously. “Where am I going to get a –” Someone places a cool bone handle in John’s hand. Evy’s voice goes up an octave. “RICK! What did I tell you about lethal weapons and smoking jackets, it isn’t appropriate –”

“’m fine,” Bay protests, forcing the sound out, and the way his head is tossing, the waxy pallour of his skin, it all sets John back ten years. All he needs is rain and some mud and a French accent chattering shit in his ear and he’d be nineteen again. Bay says something in Arabic, and then his long fingers are around John’s wrist. His breath is coming raggedly and Evy is pressing down hard on his stomach still, though the cloth she’s using – Rick’s jacket, John thinks – is long since sodden. They must’ve driven like the devil. Bay squeezes. “O’Connell,” he pants, “I don’t want _him_ – responsible for my medical care –”

John shrugs him off, ignoring him. “Stay still, would you,” he says, mildly, “there’s a good chap. I’m going to cut your clothes off now.”

All the breath rushes out of Bay’s lungs. John cuts his belt with an upward slice like gutting a fish, his robes, his undershirt, shoves them all off his shoulders; underneath his skin is damp with sweat. The indented black tattoos ripple as his muscles clench and unclench, visible indicators of the waves of pain. Bay doesn’t protest anymore because the tug of material has rendered him semi-conscious; the wound is a long slice across his stomach. John could cry with relief. “Not deep, just messy,” he says. “Rick, I need alcohol. Something strong, not whiskey. Vodka.”

Rick pulls a flask out of his pocket, sniffs it. “Will tequila do?”

Evy lets out an incoherent noise of outrage at the concept of her husband bringing tequila to dinner. John wrinkles his nose. “It’ll have to,” he says. “Hold him down.”

The best thing about O’Connell – other than, obviously, the fact that he looks after John’s baby sister better than John ever could – is that he’s been out in the field. John suspects that he’s seen fast stitching like this before; he grasps Bay’s shoulders, and Evy puts her weight on his hips, and John cuts away the material until the gash is as exposed as it can be, pumping out blood as it is, and tosses the tequilla on it, and Bay’s scream clogs his chest up. “No hospitals?” asks John once the echo has died, knowing the answer already, snapping a thread with his teeth.

“No hospitals,” confirms Rick, grimly.

They haven’t had proper medical care in months – it’s pretty hard to explain knife wounds when you received them fighting the undead. It’s probably only luck that’s meant he hasn’t been in this position before, needle in hand, crouched over Rick, or – God forbid – Evy, trying to fix something he isn’t qualified to touch.

Bay’s skin is slippery, and when he’s done stitching John’s mouth tastes metallic, like the other man’s blood has soaked through his pores and made its way to his tongue. Bay is panting but he’s conscious, Rick’s hands tight on his shoulders; he has one arm thrown up above his head. John remembers that he slept like that too, the one time he’d seen him unguarded, like a pirate washed up on the shore, sprawled – strange, for someone who grew up in tents, close confined quarters. He expands like a gas, uses up all the space given to him. His long hair sticks to his forehead, to the side of his neck, his headscarf long gone. John grits his teeth when he splashes the alcohol again, but this time Bay inhales, exhales sharply, and makes no sound. Evy is shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she says, because maybe she can see something on his face that he can’t sense, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought him here, shouldn’t have made you –”

John pats her arm absently. “Don’t be daft,” he says, not unaffectionately. “Get me some cloth, warm water. We can’t let it get infected, even after the tequilla.”

Bay is still panting. He says something in Arabic again, and John has picked up enough over the years to know that he’s swearing, long and fluent. He says, “you and me both, old boy, you and me both,” and Bay flashes him that sharp grin, all teeth like a coyote. It’s strange to hear Arabic here, in this old house, and for a moment John is confused – he realises in a lurch that he was expecting French, army French, _oui oui absolument je l’ai niqué – oui cette femme oui je la baise de temps en temps_ – _regarde-la alors_ , or, worse, behind-the-lines hospital shrapnel-wound French, _s’il te plait, mamen, s’il te – je dois –_ it’s as if the December cold is right there at his shoulder, ready to draw over him like a veil, bringing with it the numbness of his fingers that he couldn’t shake for months, the heavy shake of the ground under mortar fire, the flash of bone under blood.

The bowl in Evy’s hands is too nice to be used like this, all blue and white porcelein. John dips the cloth in it anyway. Rick holds Bay up to help John strip him properly to the waist, and together they get the worst of the blood off his chest, his stomach, his arms, his hands. His eyes keep fluttering closed, but he’s clinging to consciousness with that familiar stubborness that has always made John want to deck him. When John looks up again, the blood falling from his fingers like red ribbons, the girl, Mary or Marianne or Mariah, is standing at the top of the stairs.

The urge to ignore her is almost overwhelming. She doesn’t belong here; John is too blinkered to recognise her as a real human being, someone who requires communication, she’s so out of place – the rhythm of this, of examine-clean-stitch-clean-sleep, is a well worn groove that has no space for her, with her soft cloud of blonde hair and her confused eyes and the way his suit jacket slips off her shoulders. They’re all frozen, staring at her.

“Uh,” says Rick, who has a knife in one hand and the visible line of a gun shoved down the back of his dinner trousers.

“Oh,” says Evy, with her hair halfway down and her shoes off and a cloudy glass of arak in her hand, ready to numb the pain.

“Right,” says John, who has Bay’s blood smudged all over his forehead.

“What’s going on?” asks the girl in a very small voice.

It’s at this point that Bay struggles upright, which has the joint consequences of breaking the fearful silence and sending John into a tizzy of fury.

“Are you _insane_?” he gasps, losing his temper for the first time, rounding on him; he bodily shoves the man back down, tearing a groan from him as the stitches stretch. “Stay _still_. For the love of all that is holy, Ardeth, are you that desperate to bleed all over me again?” Rick and Evy are both blinking at him. Bay lifts himself onto his forearms, a compromise. It must be agony; the gash was right over his abdominals. “Oh, for _fuck’s_ –” John begins viciously, forgetting himself.

“Where are my swords?” interrupts Bay. His voice is hoarse.

“Car, buddy,” says Rick.

“What is going on?” repeats the girl, somewhat hysterically.

“ _Jonathan_ ,” Evy hisses.

It’s just like old times.

“I’m going to be five minutes,” says John, in his most threatening tone. It must be at least somewhat convincing, because Bay regards him with a certain amount of incredulity. “If I come back and find you’ve moved one _single inch_ on this table, I swear I will drive you to St Bart’s myself, and I will _leave you there_ , and then you’ll have to try and explain why you have no identifying documents and carry _scimitars_ around London. Got it?”

Rick is looking at him like he’s having a mental break. John points the knife at Bay. He repeats, “got it?”

Bay rolls his eyes. He lowers himself onto his back, forearms shaking. “Got it,” he mumbles at the ceiling, mutinously.

John lays the knife down carefully. He glares at Rick. “Don’t let him near sharp things.”

“Alright, alright,” says Rick, raising two hands.

Halfway up the stairs, halfway to the girl, he turns. Evy has her hand on Bay’s forehead, smoothing the hair away; Rick is piling up his robes in a dark clump, ready for burning or cleaning, whichever is less incriminating. John takes a long slow breath and lets it all recede, and when he turns back to her the girl is soft and terrified, and he reaches for her and says, “don’t worry, he slipped and I used to be a doctor. It’s nothing serious. Nothing serious.”

He’s more than five minutes, but he returns with liquor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The French translates (roughly) as the following:
> 
> "oh yeah, sure, I fucked her - yeah, that women, I fuck her from time to time - oh, look at that" // "please, mama, pl - I have to -"
> 
> (I do speak French but I'm not a native so hmu if you have a correction or even some fun WWI slang because I'm always here for that)


	3. 1929

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m thinking we try for the Ancient Mesopotamians next. They’re sure to have a good curse or two. I think all Evelyn needs is a good old curse to crack. A bit of life-threatening danger.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two notes.  
> 1\. the ages on the mummy wiki make absolutely no sense, so I created my own timeline. (If you want to know, in 1929, John is 33, Evy is 31, Ardeth is 35, Alex is pushing 3, and Rick is around 37, but he isn't entirely sure. I've got an excel spreadsheet and everything).  
> 2\. Trust me, I also cannot believe I'm publishing another chapter of this after two years, but here we are.

**1929**

One morning over breakfast, Evy folds her newspaper with a very particular, triumphant manner that makes John want to scuttle towards the door. “Dear God,” he says, reaching over to pour himself another coffee. “What is it?”

“It’s Cornelia Whittington-Worth,” she says, as though John, who made it a habit at school to never remember anyone’s name if it was double-barrelled, a promise to himself that he has never broken, should know who this is. “She’s engaged. At last.”

John looks towards Rick, who has his nose very pointedly buried in his own copy of the _Times_ , and says, “do you hear what your wife has become?”

“I’ve been working on this match for _years_ ,” Evy continues, enthusiastically buttering her toast.  “I don’t think you quite understand, Jonathan, how much work I’ve put in to this damn thing – excuse my language. The poor girl’s been alone since her husband was killed in France, and Henry Shering is the absolute perfect man –”

“Are you listening to this?” John asks Rick, somewhat desperately. Rick doesn’t even lift an eyebrow, but does somehow manages to reach out from around his newspaper, grasp the handle of his coffee cup, and retreat back inside its pages without spilling a drop.

“And after that damned Lady Roberts – excuse my language – tried to get involved and steal Henry for _her_ daughter, well I had to step in –”

“Do you think we should try and find another ancient tome?” John suggests cheerfully. “Perhaps there’s one in the archives of the Victoria and Albert – he was a bloody magpie, that man, he must’ve found something dangerous enough for our tastes.”

“– because otherwise Cornelia would have continued to ask me for tea every single fucking Monday – excuse my language – and I just can’t have it, I can’t. If I have to make approving noises over her snot-nosed rat of a nephew one more time –”

“I’m thinking we try for the Ancient Mesopotamians next. They’re sure to have a good curse or two. I think all Evelyn needs is a good old curse to crack. A bit of life-threatening danger.”

“– so it looks like the wedding is in July, which gives me plenty of time to find some kind of excuse –”

“Mesopotamia, Evelyn, we’re going to Mesopotamia in July.”

Rick looks up over the top of his newspaper. “Mesopotamia doesn’t exist,” he says, and then goes back to his crossword. John points a finger at him.

“Iraq, Evelyn. Your husband thinks we should go to Iraq in July. Doesn’t that sound dangerous?”

Evy is not listening. She’s still rattling on, and has now buttered her toast so enthusiastically that she is actually buttering the china plate beneath it. John eyes it with some delight, picking up his coffee. “– and if I warn her too far ahead of time, she might change the date, which won’t do – I can manage the shopping, but not the standing around, not if I’m not allowed to drink – but the point of all of this is –!”

She stops, looking at Jonathan brightly. Jonathan looks at her, then over his shoulder, hoping to see someone else there, but no such luck. He turns back to face her with an air of resignation. “What is the point, Evelyn?”

“The point is, Jonathan, I think it’s time we got you married.”

He drops his coffee cup, which hits the Turkish carpet with a sad little thud, no smash, and spills over the priceless fibres. Rick, at last, begins to pay attention, if only to laugh. “You have _got_ to be joking,” he says, grinning broadly. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in _months_.”

-

Jonathan tries again, somewhat weakly, three days later, when he’s helping Evy fix their motor-car. Well, he’s watching Evy fix her and Rick’s Rolls, but he tells himself he’s helping, because he’s very good at handing her the right spanner at the right time. “You know that I’m not getting married, Evelyn,” he says.

“Sorry?” she says, from the bowels of the car. She pushes herself, flat on her back on the wooden platter, out back onto the gravel path, streaks of oil across her forehead. If only Cornelia Whittington-Worth could see her now, Jonathan thinks grimly. He _hates_ Cornelia Whittington-Worth. “Did you say you’d love to get married? Well, that’s wonderful, John, I know just the girl.”

He tries to throw the spanner at her, but she’s vanished again with a cheerful crunch of wheels on stone, and instead he just chips the burgundy paintwork, which makes him more sad than satisfied.

-

“I’m not getting married,” he says, once more. It’s the Saturday next. Rick is hovering over Alex with a spoon of what looks alarmingly like boeuf bourguignon, making odd humming noises as he tries to coax the stubborn toddler into opening his mouth. Jonathon is hovering like a distressed heron, getting in the way of the cook, the butler, and all the kitchen maids. Gone are the days, he thinks mournfully, when the maids would go all a-flutter when he came down because they wanted to flirt with him; now they’re just worried he’ll break something.

“Of course you’re not,” Rick says absently.

“I’m really not,” John says, flapping his hands and sending several maids scurrying towards him, wooden spoons raised threateningly. “I’m sorry – sorry – but I’m not. I can’t. I’m – I’m only interested in men. There it is. Arrest me.”

Rick looks up momentarily from his son, who has a smear of gravy over one eye that looks much like his mother’s engine oil. Odd, the symmetry of genetics. The messiness of the Carnahans. “John, you cannot bullshit me. I’ve known you to fuck men and women. We just want you to damn well marry one of them.”

“I don’t think you should swear like that in front of the baby,” John says, sulkily. “He’s impressionable.”

-

A month passes – September melts into a blustery, cold, October. John escapes over to Berlin for a week, but doesn’t dare stay longer, in case he returns to find one of Evelyn’s friends-who-are-not-her-friends, already attired in white, waiting at the door. Besides, Berlin is rather less fun these days; the streets are grey, and the people are quiet. When he lets himself in through the porter door, in a vague attempt to avoid his sister’s ministrations until the morning, and sneaks up the servant’s back stairs, and emerges out into the East Wing, third floor, he sees Ardeth Bay leaning against his bedroom door. He almost has a heart-attack.

Ardeth watches with some vague amusement as John clutches at his chest and tries not to scream the house down. His voice seems muffled by the carpets when he says: “I could have killed you three times over by now.”

“Good thing you’re not trying to!” John says, his voice coming out rather more high-pitched than he would like. Then he says, more forcefully: “What the bloody hell are you doing here?” And then, whirling around. “You’re not here to marry me off, are you?”

Ardeth blinks. He gets that look on his face, when he’s trying to decipher whether John’s just spouted some incomprehensible English idiom or if he’s being just regularly incomprehensible. He settles for, “what?”

“Evelyn and Richard are attempting to marry me to one of the heiresses she’s adopted. They think it’ll be good for me.” Jonathan dumps his overnight bag on the floor by his bedroom door and flexes out his hand. “Hence the secrecy. How the hell did you know I was in.”

“You roared up the drive in a Bentley, Jonathan,” Bay says, with some patience. Then he says, “and I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” takes John by the collar, and drags him inside.

-

Later – much later, when the sun is beginning to come up over the lake, sending shards of light through the diamond pains – John reaches over Ardeth to grab the pack of cigarettes from his bedside table. He isn’t sure how he ended up on the other side of the bed, except that Bay has, once more, taken up all the space available to him, sprawled and naked and mostly asleep. He cracks open one eye to watch John prop himself against the headboard and light up. “Married?” he says.

His accent is stronger in the mornings. John has learned that slowly, over the last six years. Thirty-three years old, and he still nearly drops ash on his stomach at the sound of it. “What?” he says, through a mouthful of smoke. Ardeth neatly plucks the Nil from his mouth and saves the house from an inferno. “Oh, yes. Evelyn. Marriage. Many plans. I think she’s dreadfully bored, you know. All this housewifery, children, nonsense.”

“I thought you were joking.” Ardeth looks strange in the blue-grey light, drained of colour. He examines the cigarette as he holds it between two fingers, then rolls over and props himself up on one forearm. He needs a haircut; it hangs almost to the mattress over one shoulder, curling a little like a woman’s. He has a half-healed scar on one shoulder that John has not seen before, and the creasing of laugh-lines at the corners of his eyes, shattered spider-webs. He doesn’t smoke, and it’s a waste to let the thing burn down, but John lets him watch it until he can’t any longer and has to take it from him and knock the ash off into the crystal tray. He places it between them and lights another, determined to smoke it this time. He French inhales, the smoke curving over his upper lip, and then grins, school-boy like, pleased with himself and his trick. Ardeth has a hand on his thigh, heavy and familiar.

“I wish I were joking. I wish they were joking.” John frowns. “Do you think they’re joking?”

“Quite an extended joke, no?”

John raises his eyebrows to himself. “You say that. But I think Evy could be bored enough. She considered beginning a coffee morning circular. I told her she should find an apocalypse to avert, but she didn’t think that was very funny.”

“Neither do I,” Ardeth says, his mouth curving upwards, his hand curving upwards also.

"Christ," John says, his head falling back, and the cigarette, half-smoked, is wasted.

-

They wake again just before noon, and make their way downstairs with a vague attempt at respectability – Ardeth even opens the door to his room, sticks his head in, then follows Jonathan down the stairs towards the parlour. Yawning into his shoulder, John tosses his jacket over a chair, flicks Rick – who has the deep-ringed eyes of a father who’s been up the entire night – companionably on the ear, and says, “we’re in time for lunch?”

Rick glowers at him. “I hope you know that I hate you.”

John grins at him, all sharp teeth, languid, happy. Ardeth, piling his plate with toast, says nothing, but moves with the walk of a big cat recently fed. Rick makes a noise of mingled disgust and irritation, gathers up the three pistols he’s been cleaning, rolls them in their oil clothes, and makes for the door. At the frame, he turns and points a finger at John. “Marriage,” he says.

“Quite right, old boy,” John says, smirking. “Clearly the superior institution. Consider me jealous. Cowed, even.”

“You’ve never been cowed in your life,” says Rick, in exactly the same tone as John’s old school-masters used to use, and turns on his heel, likely to retreat to his library, which is rapidly becoming a weapons room. Watching him go, Ardeth cocks his head to one side.

“You know, I don’t think they’re joking,” he says.

“Neither do I,” John says grimly. “That’s why I fully intend on going to Iraq in July.

They are polishing off the remains of their toast – and mackerel, and black pudding, and grapes, and coffee – when Evy, looking as fresh as a May-day morning with the temperament of a December storm – strides into the room, Alex in arms. She says, in a low, deadly hiss, “if you leave your swords on the dining room table again, I will use them to make you into a kebab.”

Ardeth winces. John says cheerfully, “it wasn’t me, mum, I promise,” and then says, noticing the sleek fit of her white dress, the sharp cut of her jacket, the careful curl of her hair, “are we having visitors?” Alex has a red stamp of lipstick on his temple and is squirming to be let down, but Evy holds him in a vice-like grip, and he soon determines that resistance is futile. John looks at him with some sympathy.

“Visitors?” Ardeth says. Evy looks at him threateningly. “Swords,” he repeats. “Ah. I’ll –”

“You do that.”

John looks at him pleadingly, but Evy’s wrath is a far greater threat, and he disappears into the entrance hall. Sometimes John wonders how they keep any servants on at all; a small suspicious kernel is forming in the pit of his stomach. “Evelyn,” he says, rather seriously, “if there is an eligible woman coming, I would rather face the guns.”

She is fussing with Alex’s little sailor suit, but, with a sigh, she finally gives in and puts the tiny boy down. With a whoop, he rushes off, presumably in the direction of the nearest puddle of mud, or high surface to pitch himself off. He’s got sturdy bones, John thinks to himself. It’s been proven time and again. He stands up, brushes the crumbs off his shirt, and goes over to his sister. There was once a time that she was taller than him; now, he can tuck her under his chin. She goes, malleable yet somehow all sharp edges and corners, like a thorned flower, and rests her forehead in the hollow of his throat where his tie hangs loose and undone. “Oh, John,” she says, in a long, deep breath. “I’m not cut out for this life.”

With a hum of reassurance, he glides a hand down her back, following the pinstripes of the jacket. “Then stop trying to live it,” he says, quietly. “Do you think Rick would mind? Evy, he would follow you to the Arctic Circle if you asked him to. He doesn’t want you to be like this, in a skirt you can’t run in, in shoes that squeak, with your hair all done up.” He tweaks an unruly curl, then sets her back on her feet, hands firm on her shoulders. Her eyes are a little bit wet, and he puts a thumb on her nose, then flicks. She pouts up at him, momentarily eight. “Listen to me. Cancel whatever this damn thing is. Pack three bags. Take the baby, and go.”

“Go where?” she sighs, and he can feel it in her, that desperation, that drive. He knows it. He lives it.

“Anywhere,” he says. “Anywhere. You can go anywhere. He’ll go with you. You’ve just got to stop being scared and jump.” He chucks her under the chin. “Go somewhere where no one is called Cornelia.”

Evelyn grins at him. For a moment they are mirror images, just as sharp-toothed, with their odd cat-eyes. “Iraq,” she says.

“Mesopotamia,” he says.


End file.
